


Ghost Watch

by daroos



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: AU: Cops, M/M, Police AU, Stalkey Winter Soldier, prompt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-10
Updated: 2014-10-10
Packaged: 2018-02-20 14:23:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,840
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2432027
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/daroos/pseuds/daroos
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve has the feeling someone is watching him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ghost Watch

“You okay, Rogers?” Tony asked.

Steve took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes, shook his head to clear it. “Yeah. Just haven’t been sleeping right.”

“Trouble with the missus?”

Steve rolled his eyes at the other man. They both knew Steve was a chronically single case since his college sweetheart had been deported for visa violations. The state department could be downright draconian. “Just haven’t been sleeping right. The apartment feels...” he shrugged. “I don’t know how to explain it.” Steve turned back to his report.

“Ghosts?” Tony suggested. Steve’s head popped up in surprise. “Wait, really? I thought you were a man of science.”

“I just’ve felt like I’m being watched, or something. Which is ridiculous because I’m on the 11th floor.”

“Yeah. Quite a ways for a peeping Tom to climb up just to peep. Ghosts are of course the logical answer.”

Steve threw him a sarcastic look. “Don’t you have some suspect to track down?” His voice was acerbic.

Tony held his hands up. “Hey, all I’m saying— if you want me to get those Ghost Hunter guys out to case your place, I can make that happen.” He threw Steve a pair of finger-guns and backed out of the morgue.  
\--  
Now that he’d brought it up -- voiced the knowledge that his home didn’t feel _right_ for some subtle, difficult to pinpoint reason -- he felt a crawling sensation over his back wherever he went, like fingertips tracing his skin. Steve hadn’t survived three tours in Afghanistan by ignoring his gut, or that prescience that told a person when they were being watched. In spite of that, there was nothing to _do_ about the oozing certainty that _something was wrong_. Every time he whipped around to stare hard down an alleyway, it was empty but for mist and darkness. Every window he glanced into, anxious that someone peered at him through the blinds, it was nobody at all. The paranoia wrapped around in a loop, constricting his life until he found himself sticking to an irregular schedule of work, groceries, gym, home.

A hand fell on Steve’s shoulder, and he startled with a yelp, pushed back from his lab bench and gained his feet in a single motion. Tony took three hurried steps back until he was just to the side of the door, carefully not blocking the exit. “You okay, big guy?” he asked, his words casual but from his voice, obviously shaken.

Steve took a big breath and huffed it out in a futile attempt to clear his head. “I’m fine.”

“Really? Because it looked like you were gonna throw a punch at me.”

Steve took another breath. “What do you need, Tony?”

Tony frowned and stooped so he could look into Steve’s face straight on. His eyes go the distant, focused look that Steve associated with cases and problem solving, and the other man rolled a free lab chair over and sat across from him. “I need you to tell me what’s going on.”

Steves eyes flicked to the folder Tony had set aside. Tony waved his hand in a dismissive gesture. “Not important. What’s got you wound up so bad you almost took a swing at me?”

“You remember what I was talking about a while ago?”

Tony frowned, and Steve could practically see the cards flip-flip-flipping by in his mental rolodex as he probably went through every line of every conversation they’d had in the last month. Tony was amazing like that -- amazing brain, thought patterns like thunderstorms, and a memory better than a steel trap. Steve saw the moment when Tony hit upon the right memory: his eyes refocused, his gaze tinted with confusion. “Ghosts?” he asked with a little deprecating quirk to his lips.

The place between Steve’s eyebrows pinched tight and he looked down and away.

“Look, hey, no.” Tony crouched even lower and leaned to the side so he was in Steve’s line of sight. “You’ve got a good instinct. If you—” Something flipped behind Tony’s eyes and he went from bantering Steve-didn’t-know-quite-if-they-were-friends to Detective Stark. He listened intently while Steve laid out what had him all twisted up.

“Look, Natasha owes me a favor.”

“No, I don’t want—”

Tony made a loud shushing noise and laid his pointer finger over Steve’s lips. “She likes scaring out lurkers. It’ll be like a party for her.”  
\--  
“So, interesting development on your creeper situation.” Tony spun a lab chair around and sat down in it backwards. He rested his forearms over the backrest and Steve turned his gaze aside to avoid staring, and potentially drooling over the strong cording of muscle.

“I noticed Barton lurking last night and eating like, two boxes of doughnuts: he needs to work on his subtlety.”

“Barton was just the decoy. Look at these.” Stark dropped a spread of what had to be the lowest contrast night photos Steve had ever seen. “Brucie did his best to get some contrast, but you really need some better street lighting.”

A moment’s scrutiny and Steve identified his own window, lit with the light of the kitchen and criss-crossed with black lines of his fire escape. It was a bit after full dark late in the evening. Steve stared hard at the photos but couldn’t make out what he was meant to see, either due to the quality or his inexperience.

“What am I looking at?” Steve asked.

Tony stood and pressed close, all down Steve’s side ostensibly to look over the pictures. “Look here.” Tony traced one strong finger in an oval along the edge of the fire escape. “Look like something to you?”

A patch of the darkness seemed darker, and the longer he stared at it, somewhat human shaped. “Is that—”

“Super-stalker creepytastic peeping-tomalicious? Yes.”

“There’s a person? A real honest person who’s been staring in my window?”

“And following you around some of the time, according to Romanov.”

A shiver went up Steve’s spine which he was certain Stark could feel, pressed against his side.

“Look, Rogers, you’re probably the most decent guy I know, but is there some way you pissed someone off? Anybody with a motive to start up this kind of intimidation?”

Steve leaned into Stark just a little bit, just for a sliver of physical support while he thought. Stark held solid against him. “I can’t think of anything. I really can’t.” Even the cases he’d done forensics on recently had been relatively tame, low-profile stuff.

“Okay. Fair. I’m gonna keep Romanov on you for nights -- see if she can’t catch this guy and bring him in.”

Steve nodded. He didn’t particularly like it, but Stark’s protective streak necessitated the other man do _something_.  
\--  
Somehow the knowledge that someone really was following him -- that the creeping feeling of being watched was due to the fact that he _was_ being followed -- eased something inside him. It was no longer a nebulous, unfounded feeling, but a sharp reality. Who the hell it _was_ was another sort of question.

Barton was in the entirely unsubtle squad car out front of his building. Natasha had eyes on him even if he couldn’t guess from where. The backup emboldened him. He made two cups of coffee, propped open the window which led to his fire escape, and crawled out.

His phone pinged almost immediately with a text from Natasha. _What are you doing?_ it said. He shrugged, and before he could put it back in his pocket it began to ring with Highway to Hell, Barton’s ringtone. He rolled his eyes, thumbed it to silent, and tossed it onto the couch inside.

“I’m a popular guy tonight,” Steve commented to himself. He sipped his coffee. “I don’t know how you were raised, but where I grew up it wasn’t really polite to follow a fella without letting him know about it.” The hairs up and down the back of Steve’s neck rose to attention, but the silence of the night continued uninterrupted. He hitched his hips against the window sill.

The glint of eyes drew his attention out of the darkness. Whoever it was was balanced on a line of bricks one story down and to the side of Steve’s apartment.

“You want some coffee?” Steve asked.

“His peeping tom’s head tipped slowly to the side. “Ain’t you worried I’ll do something to ya?”

Steve frowned. The voice was familiar -- was it someone he knew who’d been doing this?

“I figured if you were planning to throw me off a balcony you’d’ve found a way to do it by now.”

His visitor grunted, but moved onto the fire escape from the ledge. He had shaggy dark hair and the way his steps rang on the metal of the fire escape’s grating, he wore heavy boots. His jacket hung limp off his left shoulder, which caused a surprising spike of worry for this man in Steve: he had been hanging off a building at ten stories up with only one arm. Steve picked up the second cup and crouched to offer it to the man. He reached for it, and tipped his face up towards Steve.

Steve froze. His fingers went suddenly numb and the mug slipped from his hand. The coffee splashed over the man’s face and hand, and the mug dropped to the street below, clanging and shattering as it fell.

“Bucky?” Steve asked in a faint voice. The man was gone.  
\--  
“He didn’t come back all night.” Natasha looked grumpy, probably due to having watched Steve’s window all night. Not that Steve looked much better, having remained awake for much of the night in a whirling pinwheel of guilt, confusion, anger, and desperate hope.

“We have to find him,” Steve insisted.

“Why?” Stark practically wailed. “You didn’t even know he existed until a few days ago.”

“I knew him,” Steve asserted. His temple of solitude in the basement of the precinct had become grand central terminal for Stark and his ilk. Barton sat on his lab bench, and Natasha leaned in the space between Barton’s spread legs. “He was...” Steve trailed off as he tried to think how to finish his sentence so that he didn’t sound utterly crazy. “He’s dead. He was dead.”

“How dead?” Barton asked. Everyone looked at him with faces expressing various degrees of ‘what the fuck’. He held up his hands. “Hey, you know what my cases have looked like recently. Dead’s got degrees.”

Steve felt something inside of him crack and break, and the thinnest veneer of professionalism held him from curling up around the knot of pain in his middle. “James Barnes, killed in action in 2010 during a tour in Afghanistan. I lost him— He—” Steve stopped. “I lost him during a withdrawal. We tried to recover his remains but there was— It wasn’t possible. He couldn’t have...”

Stark wrapped his arm around Steve’s shoulders and squeezed gently. “You’re sure?” he asked, low and gentle.

“That’s not a mistake I would make. It was him.”

“Seems pretty simple, then: find him and bring him in.”


End file.
